Thursday, July 21, 2016

doing some OG eating in the city

as you might imagine, we did a whole lotta eating while we were in san francisco. i contemplated doing a post just about all the food we enjoyed...but then realized that it would end up being just too damn long. and then you'd get bored and stop reading and that would just be sad.

i don't know how i managed to overlook it - well, maybe i do...blogging from my phone is really painful. anyway, for our first meal in the city, we took a short walk around the corner and up the street to what billed itself as "america's oldest italian restaurant."

we were warmly greeted and shown to a table right away, where we perused the menu and found that it reminded us a lot of our trip to italy a few years ago.

once we spied burrata on the list of appetizers, it was game over. we asked the server if the chef would add some prosciutto to it. he balked at the request at first, but when i said that we would be happy to pay for the additional ingredient, he agreed to put the order in. i don't know, was that an insult to the chef? in any case, it came out just as we'd hoped, and he set it down on the table and proudly informed us that the prosciutto would be no additional charge. so, yay?

it was delicious, of course. as was my tagliatelle alla bolognese:

the old lady's lasagne bolognese:

and the bean's spaghetti with two giant meatballs.

dessert? sure!

crema caramello is just the fancy italian way of saying "flan."

just like gelato means "ice cream."

their tiramisu was just okay. not the best ever, but it still fulfilled the old lady's sweet tooth.

and then the next day, while the bean was enjoying day two of animation cap, we headed to chinatown to eat at the oldest continuously operating dim sum restaurant in the country. sense a pattern? heh.

it was kind of a bitch to get there, and we ended up parking a few blocks away in the parking structure where we ended up walking uphill and through a rather janky looking alley to get to our destination.

it was pretty busy when we arrived, and we ended up having to wait for a table. i'm not going to lie, i was more than a little alarmed when i noticed that not a single patron was asian. because you know if the natives aren't eating there, that's just not a good sign.

we were seated near the rear of the restaurant, by a wall of framed pageant ads and promos.

the menu was a little pricier than we're used to from dim sum restaurants at home.

and the service was painfully slow. it took forever before we were able to place our order, although i tried to explain it away with the fact that it seemed to be run by just three people - a man who appeared to be the owner, a teenaged girl, and one lady who appeared periodically from the kitchen. but as the food started rolling out, it got harder and harder to keep a happy face on. it...wasn't good.

they really played up that whole "since 1920" thing, though. i think this is what was bringing customers in...including us.

to make up for it, i took the old lady to the fortune cookie factory, which was just as busy and briefly entertaining as i remembered from last year's visit.

armed with a bag of flat fortune cookies and a handful of warm samples, we went off in search of something to drink. we found it here:

and amazingly enough, it was already time to pick up the bean, who was thrilled to dive into the bag of cookies. kinda made up for the macarons we hadn't been able to get the day before. sorta.